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Day: 27 March 2017

Preview: Manchester Lift-Off Film Festival

Written by Eliza Slawther on . Posted in Film.

On the 27th, 28th & 29th of March 2017, Lift-Off Film Festival is coming to Manchester. It will be held at Texture which is located on 67 Lever St, Manchester City Centre.

The festival seeks to promote the best of independent film making, from both students and professionals. Screenings include challenging features, short films and documentaries. The festival will end with a networking event and local filmmaker showcase.

The line-up includes:

Northern Lights, Directed by Nicholas Connor.

Northern Lights is a coming-of-age film starring Katie Quinn as a young girl named Emma, who wants to enjoy her final years of youth but is weighed down by anxiety and pressure from her mother.

The Botanist, Directed by Maude Plante-Husaruk & Maxime Lacoste-Lebuis

This award-winning short is about Raimberdi, a botanist who built his own hydroelectric station in order to aid his family’s survival during a crisis.

Where the Windmills Are Directed by Mads Erichsen

This Danish film will premier at Lift-Off festival, and is a story of young love in a school in Denmark.

To see the line-up, buy tickets and watch the trailers, visit the Lift-Off website which can be found here

Ben Pohlman Co-Director and Co-Founder of Lift-Off has said of the festival “Our film festivals are the perfect place to meet up and coming filmmakers at various stages of their careers, from new to award-winning talent, as well as other industry professionals. Through the Lift-Off Film Festivals, we aim to build a community of talented filmmakers and film enthusiasts. We’re all people who love compelling storytelling and good cinema”.

James Bradley Co-Director and Co-Founder of Lift-Off commented; “Getting into any Lift-Off Film Festival is a massive achievement. The world of independent film has grown so much over the years that many of the grass rooted filmmakers and emerging professionals are left without much of a platform any more. We felt that many of these artists who were producing exceptional work were being hugely ignored – and deserved to be seen!”

Controversy: Are sex-specific abortions OK?

Written by Jake Jones on . Posted in Opinion.

Ethics Professor and accomplished women’s rights campaigner Wendy Savage has come under fire from The Mail on Sunday and pro-life advocates for her support of sex-specific abortions.

Prof Savage, member of the British Medical Association’s Ethics Committee and long-time pro-abortionist, has voiced her support for sex-specific abortions. Her reasoning? It’s fully in the rights of a mother to terminate her pregnancy and decide what to do with her body.  Her comments follow recent statements by back-bench MPs to reinforce current laws which forbid sex-specific abortion, spear-headed by Conservative MP Fiona Bruce. 

Existing laws which forbid sex-specific abortion mean that many doctors deny women the chance to learn about the sex of their foetus, due to fear of prosecution.

In an interview with the Mail on Sunday, Prof. Savage stated that making a woman have a child of an unwanted sex “is not going to be good for the eventual child, and it’s not going to be good for [the mother’s] mental health…it’s her body and her foetus, so she should have that information”.

The Mail on Sunday published Prof. Savage’s interview on the front page with the headline: “Let mothers abort babies of ‘wrong’ sex,” inferring the ‘wrong sex’ to be female, much to the dismay of pro-choice campaigners and other medical institutions who recognise Savage’s long-term support for women’s rights.

The ethics of sex-specific abortion are much debated and have caused a great divide in opinion, as not only do they involve the ethics of abortion but also the rights of unborn female foetuses.

I believe that the right to abortion is essential for gender equality, as without this right a woman with an unwanted pregnancy is forced to see it through until birth and expected by society to raise the child for years to come.  Women have a full moral right to do what they want with their bodies and not be burdened by an undesired pregnancy.  Not permitting abortions places women at risk, forcing them to seek riskier, illegal means of abortion.

However, the thought of a woman terminating her pregnancy due to the sex of foetus could be seen to be, in the words of Tory MP Mark Field “utterly abhorrent.”  It’s easy to accuse such a woman who commits such as act as being sexist and heartless for ending a potential life on the basis of its sex organs.

However, there is very little evidence of women choosing to abort based on the foetus’ sex alone, according to the Department of Health.

Other opponents of Savage’s views draw attention to China, where the combination of the one-child policy and desires for sons to carry on the family name and to assist in manual labour have resulted in baby girls being killed to enable the family to have a boy.  This caused the Chinese population to become disproportionately male-dominated, and critics of Savage argue that similar could happen here in the UK.  It seems highly unlikely that a similar situation would occur in the UK as it has no history of female infanticide and our society certainly does not favour baby boys over girls.

Critics of sex-specific abortion don’t take into account genetic disabilities which can be more likely to appear in one sex over another, and it is already common practice to abort on the grounds of a risk of severe genetic disease or disability.

Sex-specific abortion should be allowed to give women full freedom of choice and control over their bodies.  Who is anyone else to tell them otherwise?

Live: The Orwells

Written by Irune Vega on . Posted in Music.

Sunday 5th March at Gorilla

7.5/10

Having performed the night before in Bristol, Chicago band The Orwells brought their garage rock to Manchester. This time, they came with a set of songs from their new album Terrible Human Beings.

The deranged (as NME quite correctly puts it) Dead Pretties supported the band, setting the most awkward atmosphere. The lead singer shouted at the people in the back — one would have thought he’d come off the stage and drag you to the first rows — to come closer. Then, 30 minutes of mosh pits later, they left the stage the way a rebellious, 21st-century-society-hater band is expected to do — flying drumstick included.

When The Orwells finally made their entrance into the fairly crowded venue, guitarist Dominic Corso introduced the band to the crowd: “We are The Orwells from the United States, and are now in the United Kingdom”. ‘Black Francis’, from the band’s new album was the first song to be played. However, it was ‘Dirty Sheets’, one of their oldest songs, that made most of the crowd go mad and sing the lyrics as if they were the ones asking the woman in the song to “be their saviour”. It was surprising to see that the crowd recognized and sang new songs such as ‘Hippie Soldier’ from beginning to end, or at least in the case of those less acquainted with the song, the catchy back vocals “sha la la la”.

Mario Cuomo, smartly dressed for the occasion with a golden-sequined jacket, is a phenomenon that must be analyzed on its own. His facial expressions varied from an everlasting smile to completely inexpressive at times. He danced around, dove into the crowd, and livened up the gig with his quirky behavior. The rest of the band, however, did not interact much with the crowd, other than one moment when Matt O’Keefe (guitar) started joking around and pretended to sing the first lines of ‘Wonderwall’.

Overall it was a nice gig in a welcoming venue, although it did feel like the band was unexcited about the show, which is always deflating. For example, it only lasted an hour, and when the band left the stage the stage lights were still on for about five minutes. The crowd kept asking for more songs thinking that the band had planned an encore, however soon enough the bright lights of the venue were turned on and the people kicked out. Not a good idea to do to such an excited crowd.